Delta blues is one of the earliest styles of blues music. Created by black musicians who lived and worked on the farms in north Mississippi, these men and women drew on influences from church songs, prison songs, African rhythms, and early American folk traditions to fashion a new form of music. Unbeknownst to them, the music created in this relatively small area that lies between the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers would spread the world over and shape musical history.

In this lesson Tom Feldmann takes you to where it all began, Dockery Plantation, dubbed “The Birthplace of the Blues” and highlights the earliest recording artists that gave Dockery its legendary status: Charlie Patton, Son House, Willie Brown and Tommy Johnson.

You will learn a few songs by each artist, giving you a taste of the individuals themselves as well as the genre as a whole. The majority of the lesson is done out of standard tuning, focusing on E, C and A positions. From standard tuning you move to Drop D tuning for Tommy Johnson's Big Road Blues and then to Open G (Spanish tuning) for Willie Brown's Future Blues.

Of course no lesson on Delta blues guitar would be complete without a look at bottleneck slide and this lesson is no exception with Feldmann closing with two trailblazers of bottleneck slide, Son House and Charlie Patton.

A detailed tab/music booklet is included as a PDF file on the DVD. In addition the original recordings of all the tunes are included.

Review: In days of futures past, Will Dockery's plantation was the world headquarters of Delta blues, a proving ground off in the bottomlands of Sunflower County where invention in Mississippi music making birthed the genre as the 1910s aged into the 1920s and 1930s. It was where the party got started. The resident kingpin was none other than Charlie Patton, the original Goodtime Charlie whose walloping guitar and matching crushed-glass croak were as much a part of shake-the-shack Saturday nights as the liquor, dice and knife fights. His wingman was the string-snapper Willie Brown-- yeah, that same "you can run, you can run, tell my friend Willie Brown" of "Cross Road Blues" fame. But a fallen Baptist preacher with a wicked slide addiction by the name of Son House also began hanging around, along with Tommy Johnson, a fleet-fingered connoisseur of Sterno, rubbing alcohol and all other beverages even remotely intoxicating. A motley crew of guitar revolutionaries, but the four founding fathers nonetheless. Tom Feldmann, a country-blues fanatic who devours F chords for breakfast and can bottleneck up a blizzard in his sleep, calmly lays out the blueprints to ten of their classics here. Pried apart, piece by piece, are age-old anthems as deathless as Patton's "Stone Pony Blues" and Brown's "Future Blues," Tommy's "Big Road Blues" and Son's "Levee Camp Moan." But Feldmann dips yet deeper into the plantation playbook, exhuming gems like the betrayal slide piece "It Won't Be Long." He even enlists House, Houston Stackhouse and Joe Willie Wilkins to teach a bit too via bonus archival footage. – Dennis Rozanski/Blues Rag